Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the
immediate interests of the ordinary man in the street. He is not intrigued or
impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds—something
that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this
knowledge may have an impact on him when it is embodied in new technology, until
then, he can afford to ignore it. A good bit of new knowledge, on the other
hand, is directly related to his immediate concerns, his job, his politics, his
family life, even his sexual behavior.
A poignant is the
dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive
radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of
childrearing.
At the turn of the century in the United States,
for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in
the importance of heredity in determining behavior. Mothers who had never heard
of Darwin or Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the world views
of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person,
these world views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary
people that "bad children are a result of bad stock", that "crime is
hereditary", etc.
In the early decades of the century, these
attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that
environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important,
created a new image of the child. The work of Watson and Pavlov began to creep
into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behaviorism, refusing to feed
infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning early to
avoid prolonged dependency.
A study by Martha Wolfenstein has
compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of INFANT CARE,
a handbook issued by the United Stats Children’s Bureau between 1914 and 1951.
She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning and
thumb-sucking. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still
another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in
like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began
to hear about "the rights of infants" and the need for "oral gratification".
Permissiveness became the order of the day.The passage tells us that any new knowledge will have a powerful
influence on ordinary people if ______.
